Category: Meeting

Meeting Date: Tuesday, December 6, 2016
Time: 6:00 PM social; 6:30 PM dinner; 5:15 PM presentation
Speaker: Kay Das, Technical Director at LinQuest Corp.
Location: The Doubletree Club – Orange County Airport, Santa Ana
Cost: $11.50 including dinner (no charge for presentation-only)
RSVP: from website
Event Details: meetings.vtools.ieee.org/m/42176 Summary: A light-hearted but critical look at the Connected Vehicle revolution. There is currently much on-going activity in the research and design of systems to enhance the safety of vehicular traffic on roads and highways. These include vehicle-to-vehicle based and vehicle-to-infrastructure based electronics systems with extension to personal devices. These systems need to work collaboratively in an intelligent and reconfigurable network environment characterized by multiple localized and dynamically changing motion control loops which include each individual vehicle driver (and pedestrian). Systems will comprise a mix of existing and new technologies such as laser, imaging, computer vision, radar, cellular, WiFi, GPS, millimeter Waves, and others. System complexity is very high in order to deliver and sustain the required levels of reliability. A range of products and systems will compete for market entry from diverse sources and nations.
However, a significant challenge exists in validating prototypes and final systems productized for market entry. The cost of failure is high as human life is in the loop. This presentation reviews some of the challenges and offers some directions for this burgeoning industry propelled by developments ranging from Shannon’s Law and Moore’s Law to the evolving Internet of Things and 5G cellular communications. Management of systems research and development with frugality, without over-design, and with a holistic approach on a scale probably never required before, is required.Bio: Kay Das was GPS Program Manager and Technical Director at LinQuest Corporation in Los Angeles from 2007 to 2013 where he additionally led new business development thrusts in the commercial and automotive safety markets. He has previously held responsibilities as R&D Director for STMicroelectronics’ Asia Pacific region. He is a winner of a Singapore Government National Award for “The Initiation and Expansion of High-value R&D and Promotion of Partnerships”.
He has built and led teams in different parts of the world and managed the development of diverse silicon-based signal processing systems with over 40 years industry experience. His current pursuits are the application of communication (such as 5G/ DSRC) and location technologies (such as GPS/ GNSS) to the Connected Vehicle revolution. He holds a MS in Electronics Systems from the Cranfield Institute of Technology, UK. Now in retirement, his pursuits other than Connected Vehicle include amateur astronomy, Internet radio, and he is a professional musician. He is an IEEE Life Member and a member of several societies.

Summary: Traditional server systems where compute, storage and network reside in a single server box or blade have been around for quite some time. With the emergence of hyper-scale data centers with multi-cloud requirements, the management of these servers has become more complex to support different types of cloud workloads. This has led to the creation of data-center resource pooling to support various types of cloud workloads as service providers are adopting Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) and Rack Scale Design (RSD). Fulcan Fong will present the challenges of modernizing data centers, explain what SDI and RSD are, and also talk about how service providers will benefit by adopting them.

Bio: Joe has been developing software for decades. He has worked for various companies of various sizes from startups to Fortune 500s. He has a very strong interest in hacking and cybersecurity.
He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Information and Computer Sciences from The University of California, Irvine.

Summary: By the end of the session, attendees will be able to find systems on a network, identify potential targets and learn about various exploits that could be used to compromise the target systems.

Summary: Device-to-Device (D2D) communication, MU-MIMO and mmWave are among the key technologies in the next generation (5G) cellular network as they can significantly improve the system performance on connectivity, spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency. In this talk, we will address how to exploit these technology advantages and tackle the key technical challenges to achieve high system performance gains. In particular, we will present D2D, MU-MIMO, NOMA and mmWave based schemes and their related performance study in 5G/IoT settings. These schemes include power control in D2D underlaid cellular networks, beamforming and NOMA based MU-MIMO in a downlink cellular network with underlay D2D users, and relay-assisted Millimeter Wave cellular networks. The talk will present detailed 5G system model, technology background, mathematical approaches and performance results based on both analysis and simulations. Key technical insights from these studies will be provided.

Bio: Dr. Rose Qingyang Hu [S’95, M’98, SM’06] (rosehu@ieee.org) is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Utah State University. She received her B.S. degree from University of Science and Technology of China, her M.S. degree from New York University, and her Ph.D. degree from the University of Kansas. She has more than 10 years of R&D experience with Nortel, Blackberry and Intel as a technical manager, a senior wireless system architect, and a senior research scientist, actively participating in industrial 3G/4G technology development, standardization, system level simulation and performance evaluation.

— Power & Energy Society (PES) and the Industry Applications Society (IAS) — (sequence of operation, failure modes, PLC programming, testing …
Meeting Date: (Thursday), (November 17), 2016
Time: 6:00 PM Networking; 6:30 PM Dinner; 7:30 PM Presentation
Speaker: (Mr. Jerrold Peterson of Kohler Power Systems)
Location: The Doubletree Club – Orange County Airport, Costa Mesa
Cost: None for talk only; Dinner can be purchased upon arrival – $25 for IEEE members; $30 for non-members; $10 for students
RSVP: Reservations are appreciated but not required
Event Details: meetings.vtools.ieee.org/m/41534 Summary:
The design of a complex on-site power system presents unique challenges from both a documentation and PLC programming prospective. The typical narrative sequence of operation does not provide the necessary detail to ensure that all failure modes have been accounted for. This presentation will cover:
1. How to create a chart based sequence of operation that removes all ambiguity from the sequence of operation and ensures that all failure modes have been taken into account.
2. We will also look at how this chart is used to program and test the system.
3. We will also look at best practices for programming the PLC to ensure the system never gets lost and allows easy troubleshooting and changes.
4. Finally we will look at best practices for sequence testing the system.

Bio: Mr. Peterson has over 23 years of experience in the power industry and has supported end-users and consultants for the design of mission critical, healthcare, water and industrial facilities. He currently works for Kohler Power Systems as an Engineered Solutions Manager, focusing his efforts working with a variety of customers, providing critical design support and solutions. His past experience includes working for Black & Veatch as a design engineer for the Transmission and Distribution Group, General Electric as Team Lead for the Electrical Distribution and Controls group and over 11 years with Caterpillar’s Electric Power Group as Regional Sales Manager. Jerry has lived in Texas for more than 35 years and currently resides in Frisco, TX.

Speaker Bio: Paul O’Hara, the General Manager of Mission Critical and Technical Communications for the Distribution Unit of Cummins, Inc. which provides service and application assistance of generators, automatic transfer switches and paralleling controls in North America. Paul is a registered P.E. in California and has been helping consultants apply on site power generation to facilities for over 30 years.

— ComSoc-OC: technologies, designs, features, adoption …
Meeting Date: Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Time: 6:00 PM Networking and light dinner; 7:15 PM Presentation
Speaker: Prof. Ender Ayanoglu, ECE, UC-Irvine
Location: Doubletree Hotel, 7 Hutton Centre Drive, Santa Ana
Cost: $10 IEEE members, $20 non-members, $5 students (no cost for talk only)
RSVP: not required
Event Details: comsig.chapters.comsoc.org/event/fifth-generation-5g-cellular-wireless-vision-goals-and-challenges Summary: Cellular wireless or mobile communications have seen four generations of technological developments. Starting with analog voice with the first, and then moving on to digital voice with the second generation, these generations were each marked with a clear technological advancement. For the third generation, the advancement was in incorporating data on top of a voice-based infrastructure. With the fourth generation, every service was converted into data format, or packetized transmissions, including voice and video. Today, technologists are proposing a fifth generation for around the time frame of 2020. Most consider this time to be when the infrastructure will need to be renewed. Together with this observation, it is usually argued that the new generation technology should possess a number of features. Yet, there is really no consensus on what these new features should be. Some argue that we are facing a new generation of devices that will have continuous Internet connectivity, and with that there will be more machine to-machine or machine-type communications. It is further argued that, as a result, new communication protocols should be able to support the new formats of communication that this change will require. For example, it is argued that machine-type communication will require very low latency. Others argue that the demand for services will increase by about three orders of magnitude and the new technology should be designed to support this tremendous increase, perhaps handling each order of magnitude by means of a different approach. Yet, there are others who argue that the current communications infrastructure is highly energy-inefficient and the fifth generation should be designed to solve this problem, by increasing energy efficiency by several orders of magnitude. In this talk, we will discuss the pros and cons of the approaches for defining and realizing the fifth generation cellular wireless technologies as seen today. We will discuss what fifth generation can be expected to be and, more importantly, what it cannot be. The goal in this presentation is to address both the very high expectations and the realities.Bio: Dr. Ender Ayanoglu received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, Stanford, CA in 1986 in electrical engineering. He was with the Communications Systems Research Laboratory, Holmdel, NJ, part of AT&T Bell Laboratories until 1996, and Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies from 1996 until 1999. During 1999-2002, he was a Systems Architect at Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose, CA. Since 2002, he has been a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, where he served as the Director of the Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing and held the Conexant-Broadcom Endowed Chair during 2002-2010.
His past accomplishments include invention of the 56K modems, characterization of wavelength conversion gain in Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) systems, and diversity coding. 56K modems broke what was believed to be the “Shannon limit” of about 36 kb/s for voiceband modems. Since every laptop computer includes one, the number of implementations of 56K modems is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions or even billions. His work on wavelength conversion gain in WDM networks showed large gains can be achieved via better wavelength selection and routing algorithms without the need for optical wavelength converters. And, diversity coding is a technique for link failure recovery in communication networks employing erasure coding introduced in 1990, prior to the publication of the first papers on network coding. During 2000-2001, Dr. Ayanoglu served as the founding chair of the IEEE-ISTO Broadband Wireless Internet Forum (BWIF), an industry standards organization which developed and built a broadband wireless system employing Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
(OFDM) and a Medium Access Control (MAC) algorithm that provides Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees. This system is the precursor of today’s Fourth Generation (4G) cellular wireless systems such as WiMAX, LTE, and LTE-Advanced.
From 1990 to 2002, Dr. Ayanoglu served on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Communications Society Communication Theory Committee, and from 1999 to 2001, was its Chair. From 1993 until 2014 Dr. Ayanoglu was an Editor, and since January 2014 is a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 2004 to 2008. Since December 2014, he is serving as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications – Series on Green Communications and Networking. He led the efforts to convert this series into an IEEE journal, and since June 2016, he is serving as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the new journal IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking.
Dr. Ayanoglu is the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award in 1995 and the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 1997. He received the IEEE Communications Society Communication Theory Technical Committee Outstanding Service Award in 2014. He has been an IEEE Fellow since 1998.

— CPMT — packaging design, layers, assembly, complexities …
Meeting Date: Thursday, Sept 17, 2015
Time: 5:30 PM Social/Networking; 6:00 PM Presentation; 7:00 PM dinner
Speaker: Bill Cardoso, PhD, Creative Electron
Location: Broadcom Corporation, Bldg. 2, 5300 California Ave., Irvine
Cost: none
RSVP: requested, through website
Event Details: tinyurl.com/nmvokh8 Summary: Teardowns are powerful tools to gain invaluable insight on how things are designed and built. Critical lessons can be learned from this process to improve our jobs as designers and manufacturers of electronic products. The Apple Watch went from novelty to market leader in just a few weeks. Added to its impressive commercial success, this device is an incredible work of electronic packaging design. In this presentation we will show the details of the Apple Watch teardown, showing its many layers and complexities. We augment the teardown with x-ray images of several parts of the Apple Watch to gain extra insights on how this tightly packaged device is assembled. We will also present other similar teardowns, including cell phones and wearables.Bio: Bill Cardoso started his first company in Brazil at age 17 and sold it a few years later when invited by the US Department of Energy to work at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to do nuclear and high-energy physics research. As the Department Head for Systems Engineering and after a 10-year long career at Fermilab, Bill moved from Chicago to sunny California to start Creative Electron. True to the American Dream, Creative Electron quickly grew from Bill’s garage to the largest US manufacturer of x-ray machines for the electronics industry (no longer in his garage). At Creative Electron Bill leads the team of engineers who designs and manufactures x-ray systems that are shipped worldwide. Starting with an associate degree at age 13, Bill has a BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MBA from The University of Chicago. Bill is the president of the SMTA San Diego chapter and member of the technical committee for SMTA International, SMTA Counterfeit Conference, and SMTA LED Conference, Components for Military and Space Electronics Conference, SPIE Photonics, and the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium. He is an IEEE Senior member and the author of over 120 technical publications, a contributor to 2 books, owner of a few patents, and a frequent speaker at technical conferences.

Meeting Date: Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Time: 6:00 PM Networking and dinner; 7:00 – 8:30 PM Presentation
Speaker: Dr Andre Oboler, social media expert
Location: Room 3008, CALiT2 Building, UCI, Irvine
Cost: none (dinner sponsored by Gigasavvy)
RSVP: requested, through website
Event Details: meetings.vtools.ieee.org/m/40781 Summary: Despite its pervasiveness in society, social media has been a largely unregulated domain. There have been growing concerns over the use of social media for the purposes of hate speech, incitement and the promotion of violent extremism. These issues have not been sufficiently addressed by social media companies and governments, particularly in Europe, are increasing looking to regulation. The agreement on a “Code of Conduct on illegal online hate speech” signed by the European Commission and Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft the end of May 2016 is a sign of this shift.
This talk will introduce the problem of hate speech, incitement and extremism in social media. The technical challenges in measuring and responding to these problem will then be discussed, along with some of the technical solutions which have been created. The ethical obligations of Software Engineers in light of these problems will also be considered.Bio: Dr. Andre Oboler is CEO of the Online Hate Prevention Institute an Australian charity combating racism, bigotry and extremism in social media. He also serves as an expert on the Australian Government’s Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, co-chair of the Working Group on Antisemitism on the Internet and in the Media for the Global Forum to Combat Antisemitism, and as a Vice Chair of the IEEE Computer Society’s Member and Geographic Activities Board. Dr Oboler holds a PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University (UK), a Juris Doctor from Monash University (Australia) and completed a Post Doctoral Fellowship in Political Science at Bar-Ilan University (Israel). His research interests include empirical software engineering, process improvement, hate speech in social media and the social implications of technology.